Moving a cohort off Google Forms in a weekend: a migration diary
Friday evening to Monday morning: what we rebuilt, what we left behind and what we'd do differently.
The CohortOS team · · 2 min
A program team we work with ran three years of intakes on Google Forms and a shared sheet. With a new cohort opening the following Monday, they decided to move. This is the weekend, roughly as it happened.
Friday evening: decide what not to move
The first decision was the most useful one: old responses stay where they are. The previous intakes were already decided, and nobody needed them in a new tool. The sheet was set to view-only and linked from the team's resources. Only the startups currently in the program would be set up in CohortOS.
Saturday morning: rebuild the form, shorter
Rebuilding the application form took two hours, and most of that time went on deleting questions. The old form had 38. The new one had 14, each mapped to something a reviewer would actually score.
- Applications → Manage Forms → New Form, with the form type set to Application.
- Text, email, phone, URL and select fields for the basics; textareas for the three short answers; one file upload for the deck.
- Required set on every field the screeners needed.
- A slug, an opening date, a closing date and a confirmation message.
Saturday afternoon: stages and people
Next came the review stages for the program type (screening, first review, final pitch), set up under Settings → Programs. Then the team: two program managers as Managers, five external jurors invited as Evaluators. Invites went out by email, and everyone had accepted by the evening.
The old form had 38 questions. Nobody could say who read the last twenty.
Sunday: test it like an applicant
Sunday was for testing. Three people applied on their phones with dummy startups, one of them on a slow connection. That surfaced two problems: a deck upload limit nobody had mentioned to applicants, and a confusing question about stage. Both were fixed in the form editor in minutes. Then the form was set to Active and Public, and the shareable link went into Monday's announcement.
Monday: open
Applications opened at nine. By the end of the week there were 160 of them, already sorted by status, with no copy-pasting between tabs. The team's verdict: the hard part wasn't the tool. It was agreeing which 24 questions to drop.